Although optical recognition of characters which may be hand written has long been desired for the flexibility which automatic recognition provides to the handling of information, workers in the art have not as yet brought any such system to the point where it is commercially exploitable. From time to time patents have issued which relate to optical character recognition of hand written characters (see U.S Pat. Nos. 4,066,998; 4,628,532; and 4,837,842). The principal problems which have faced the workers in the optical character recognition art appear to be in the need for an immense memory of data which map variations in the shapes of hand drawn versions of the same character and the requirement to restrict the form and Placement of the character (the way it is drawn) in order to have a reasonable chance of recognition.